In wireless communication systems that use radio frequency (RF) transmissions, an RF signal from a transmitter A may reach a receiver B via a number of propagation paths (multipath) such as shown in FIG. 1. To provide diversity against harmful path effects and improve performance, multiple transmit and receive antennas T are used. Propagation paths between the transmit and receive antennas are independent when a transmission on one path is not formed as a linear combination of the transmissions on the other paths.
A multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) communication system employs multiple transmit antennas and multiple receive antennas for data transmission. A MIMO channel formed by the transmit and receive antennas may be decomposed into independent channels, wherein each channel is a spatial subchannel (or a transmission channel) of the MIMO channel and corresponds to a dimension. The MIMO system can provide improved performance (e.g., increased transmission capacity) if the additional dimensionalities created by the multiple transmit and receive antennas are utilized.
In spatial multiplexing, there are different data streams/paths in the same channel wherein a different transmission antenna is used for each data stream. In MIMO systems, in order to realize advantages of spatial multiplexing for high spectral efficiency, the wireless channels need to be multipath-rich and less correlated.
To increase system link robustness and spectral efficiency in MIMO systems, one conventional approach uses a transmitter that employs a spatial multiplexing scheme to send signals to the receiver. However, this method is not effective if the channel is not multipath-rich. In another conventional approach, the transmitter antenna is not beamed directly at the receiver antenna. However, this method cannot guarantee to provide a multipath-rich channel. Yet in another conventional approach, passive reflectors are placed at the receiver antenna to collect more multipath signals. Again, this method cannot guarantee to provide a multipath-rich channel.
Therefore, conventional multi-path rich environments are passive wherein signals from a transmitter A travel to a receiver B by line-of-sight (LOS) and by non-line-of-sight (NLOS) which is by reflection from objects such as walls (FIG. 1). As such, there is no guarantee for multipath-rich channels and thus, the MIMO system's spectral efficiency drops (given a channel bandwidth and a fixed time period, the more bits transmitted, the higher the spectral efficiency).
There is, therefore, a need for a method and system that provide active multipaths to facilitate spatial multiplexing gain from MIMO systems.